Since you are a self-confessed novelist, it is perhaps unsurprising that you are so ignorant of the history of the novel. Firstly, the idea that Robbe-Grillet should be judged on the fate of the novel in the English-speaking world is pathetically ethnocentric. Secondly, the idea that England in particular ever produced a literary avant-garde is wofully misinformed. The journey back to the nineteenth century taken by Atonement, a novel in every respect inferior to La Jalousie, is an incredibly short one. Unlike the Irish, the english never did mange to get their novels out of the nineteenth century, and that includes Woolf, who took it upon herself to pronounce the Victorian age over even as novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To thew Lighthouse extended it, at least for literature. Finally, the fatuousness of the notion that having a philosophical basis for a novel is silly can be proven with one word: Doestoyevsky. I've never read any of your novels, Stephen Marche, and neither has anyone in the large English department in which I teach. The nonsense paraded in this column does not increase the likelihood that we ever will.

Well, Tina, since you ask, I think the people I am paid to educate at "this cow pasture college," which just happens to own the 4th largest library in the world, are amzingly smarter than francophobic twits like Marche and yourself.

But then again, I don't teach journalists.

Well Tina, having a life, I don't take my missives to you seriously enough to spend more than the 10 seconds they take to type them through the first time. But at least I have given you an opportunity to exercise a talent even more rudimentary than the journalistic fact checking you so admire. Talk about low hanging fruit. Well done. You know how to spell amazing. That certainly gives you the intellectual warrant to weigh in on the French avant garde. Correct the spelling of a longer Latinate word and I'll await with rapture your comments on string theory.

Then by all means I'll address it. an avant-garde is a movement, not an individual. Lewis was part of an avant-garde but his main collaborators--Pound, Gaudier-Breszka, Ford Huefer Ford and T. S. Eliot--were not English. So Lewis, while an avant gardist and while Engish, does not evidence the existence of an English avant-garde, at least not to doofish mind.

Then by all means I'll address it. An avant-garde is a movement, not an individual. Lewis was part of an avant-garde but his main collaborators--Pound, Gaudier-Breszka, Ford Huefer Ford and T. S. Eliot--were not English. So Lewis, while an avant gardist and while Engish, does not evidence the existence of an English avant-garde, at least not to my doofish mind.

Well, since I already got firsts at Oxford and Distinction at Penn, I find the idea of your grading me, Prytania, to be pretty risible. While Ford was born in Surrey, he was born to a German family who had just arrived there, and his upbringing was marked by their emigre status. You throw in H.D., Imagiste, along with Pound (the leader), Eliot, Gaudier-Breszka et al, you still have a movement that was hardly English by any stretch of the imagination. It was classic instance of international modernism. Sorry, but you get something less than a Pass for asserting otherwise (and I make a handsome living handing out such grades). Furthermore, however one chooses to slice the pie of 1914, Marche is simply wrong to suggest that there existed some robust avant-garde movement in the British novel tradition from which Atonement signals a retreat.

It was not Obama's comment that was tin-eared but Walsh's understanding of it. He was not comparing his grandmother's occasional insensitivity to Wright's vitriol, he was comparing the closeness of his relationship to the pastor to his relationship with his grandmother, and pointing out that in either case, he could not dissociate himself from those nearest and dearest to him on account of their imperfections.

One more thing. Everybody on the television has been decrying as lunacy Wright's claim that the U.S. government gave AIDS to black people. Inaccurate as it may be, it is not lunacy. Has anyone heard of the Tuskegee experiment?

HRC's Bosnia lies only matter because of file gate, the travel office, the N.Y. Hasids, the Edmund Hillary fib, the I'm a lifelong Yankees fan pretence, the whopper that she had a substantive role in the Irish peace talks, the untruths about her investment portfolio etc. Like all congenital liars, she's someone to be ridiculed, and ridiculed thoroughly, so that she doesn't assume the kind of power that will make her lies dangerous, like those of Bush-Cheney--at which point she too would become someone to be loathed.

Joan should be wary of turning this ludicrous figure into a pernicious one.

This is all very interesting, but the fact is that electability alone cannot be the criterion for nomination. To override the expression of the popular will of the rank and file would have long term negative consequences far more severe than the loss of a single election. Assuming that HRC remains behind in pledged delegates, as she will in states won, she simply has to overtake Obama in the popular vote to have any legitimate, constructive warrant for nomination. I don't know whether this is possible--there seems to be projections on either side--but I do know that it is necessary for her candidacy. Contra MR. De Long, there is nothing public spirited about a superdelegate decision to countermand the party at large in the name of their own notions of electability.

Should they do so in this case, they would not only be alienating, and losing, much of their most reliable constituency, African Americans, they would be alienating, and losing, the future of the party, voters 18-34, and catering to its receding past, senior citizens. That way electoral suicide lies.